Please reread this exchange very carefully and think, then read my response:
The necessity of eternalism and sufficient causation are incontrovertibly a matter of logic and science. It is their ramifications that are necessarily theological. Something has always existed, and the only sufficient cause for everything else that exists would necessarily be an eternally self-subsistent, immutable, indivisible, immaterial and timeless being of incomparable greatness. Why can't you grasp that?
You say something has always existed and I don't disagree. Where you lose me is saying that what always existed is a 'being'. Why can't it be that the universe has always existed and periodically sends out an offshoot that we see as our universe beginning with a Big Bang. We don't know what came before the BB but it seems presumptuous to fill that gap in our knowledge with a human invention.
For the moment, forget about God—i.e., the ultimate apprehension of the pertinent ramifications. Remove him from the equation of things, as it were, from in your mind.
1. That which begins to exist must have a cause of its existence.
Beyond vacuum energy, one cannot scientifically ascertain what preceded the BB with any specificity relative to the origin of our universe. That has absolutely no bearing on the ultimate ramifications of logic, mathematics and science that the physical world (the material realm of being) necessarily began to exist in the finite past. Neither our universe in its current form nor the physical world at large can be past eternal. An actual infinite is an absurdity. In this case, an infinite regress of causation cannot be traversed to the present. Humans did not invent the ultimate ramifications of logic, mathematics and science any more than humans invented the principles of eternalism and sufficient causation on which they're predicated.
Humans axiomatically and a prior intuit these things. This is what you keep failing to grasp.
Hence . . .
2. The physical world is an entity that began to exist and has a cause of its existence.
Again you claim as fact things you do not know:
- the physical world (the material realm of being) necessarily began to exist in the finite past (yet you also so "one cannot scientifically ascertain what preceded the BB")
- Neither our universe in its current form nor the physical world at large can be past eternal.
- An actual infinite is an absurdity (is God infinite?)
Again, forget about God for the moment and focus on the first two in the above.
Do not conflate the logical and mathematical apprehension that
the physical world (the material realm of being) necessarily began to exist in the finite past and the scientific apprehension that
one cannot scientifically ascertain what preceded the BB . . . i.e., beyond the apparent preexistence of vacuum energy.
They are categorically distinct apprehensions.
Recall, science's purview, as it were, is limited to the substances and processes of the physical world. Hence, no one can
scientifically assert that our universe is the one and only to have ever existed. But whether
our universe is the one and only to have ever existed, one large spacetime continuum, albeit, with localized areas of activity, one in a cyclical series of universes, or a multiverse: the cosmological configuration at large cannot be past eternal.
We cannot
scientifically preclude the former potentialities in bold, but we can logically, mathematically and scientifically preclude the possibility that the latter is past eternal!
Science has recently caught up with what logic and mathematics have told us all along about entities of space, time, matter and energy. The physical world cannot be an actual infinite.
In scientific terms:
Our theorem shows that null and timelike geodesics are past-incomplete in inflationary models, whether or not energy conditions hold, provided only that the averaged expansion condition H av > 0 holds along these past-directed geodesics. This is a stronger conclusion than the one arrived at in previous work in that we have shown under reasonable assumptions that almost all causal geodesics {i.e., as distinguished from those of higher dimensions], when extended to the past of an arbitrary point, reach the boundary of the inflating region of spacetime in a finite proper time" ( Borde-Guth-Vilenkin).
This theorem extends to cyclical inflationary models and the inflationary models of multiverse as well. The physical universe at large, regardless of the chronological or the cosmological order of its structure, cannot overcome the thermodynamics of entropy.
Joined by others, Vilenkin summarizes the matter as follows:
It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning (Many World in One; New York: Hill and Wang, 2006, pg. 176).
I would encourage you to read my article in which I discuss all of the potential cosmological models, so that you may have a more comprehensive understanding as to why this is so. Create a Youtube account and sign in before you click on this link:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr5aMlaeI6J7FOrDc0kctDg/discussion . You don't have to post anything, and you can always delete the account after reading the article and asking any questions you might have
